Feedback—Collecting the “Why” without burdening your customer

Everything seemed to be going great on the project. You hit your milestones and even came in under your projected budget. You made the delivery on time. And yet, after receiving the final payment, you never heard from the customer again. Why? What happened? What expectations went unmet?

Frequently, businesses will use surveys to get feedback from customers after the conclusion of an engagement. But surveys are frequently lengthy and can be burdensome to respond to. Getting a good response rate is difficult. Event if the customer does respond to your survey, it happens after the fact. The customer’s recollection of exactly what happened may be fuzzy or distorted by recent events. And after the fact, it’s too late to fix any problems that might have saved the engagement.

If you don’t know what the customer is thinking about their interactions with you and the services you are providing to them, you don’t know if you are providing value that they really need. Getting feedback from your customers is critical to meeting their expectations.

You need a mechanism to acquire customer feedback during an engagement rather than afterwards. You need to collect the feedback frequently, so that problems can be identified early and course corrections made before it’s too late. It needs to be quick and easy for your customers so they are more likely to respond.

Micro-feedback presents a solution to this dilemma. A typical micro-feedback request asks the customer “How are we doing right now?” and invites them to give a quick thumbs up or thumbs down response and an optional comment. An additional level of detail can be provided, but is entirely optional. Micro-feedback requests can be sent to the customer at every touchpoint, alerting you to issues as they occur and enabling immediate an response. Responses can be collected frequently and this allows you to track and improve your customer’s experience during the engagement, rather than after.

For more information about micro-feedback and how you can collect it consistently and track your customers’ sentiment during an engagement, visit www.reputada.com.